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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Les Savy Fav: Hip Hop for Imperfection
Wednesday 02 April @ 12:24:09 |
 by P.J. Morel
It can be difficult to believe, but there was a time when art was so important to people, so central to society in general, that popular reaction to a particular piece of artwork could actually spill into the streets. These days Marilyn Manson can’t get arrested for all his crass shock rock shtick; but back when Stravinsky debuted his “Rite of Spring,” for example, audiences were so outraged by what they heard that they looted the streets of Paris to show their displeasure. The composer had provoked an honest-to-god art riot.
Though they play a sort of angular, fractured punk more suited to the postmodern zeitgeist, in spirit Les Savy Fav harken back to those heady days when people cared enough about music to actually break something in protest. It’s not that Les Savy Fav want to be reviled—the band never resorts to crass Manson-like posturing to get a reaction—but the foursome’s entire existence is predicated on engaging their audience. That can be a cliché, of course: all musicians at least pay lip service to audience interaction. You have to see singer Tim Harrington scaling the wall of a club, microphone in hand, to appreciate the lengths these guys will go to make sure they have your attention.
The time I saw the band live last year certainly ranks as one of the most memorable shows I’ve experienced. Les Savy Fav was playing in The Northstar Ballroom at the U of M St. Paul student center (presumably because the Whole was still under construction at that point.) The North Star Ballroom is an odd duck indeed, at least as a venue for a rock show: it looks just like a high school gymnasium, with linoleum flooring and fake-wood-paneled walls. There’s a stage built into one wall; a lone disco ball twirls overhead.
As the band was setting up their equipment, Harrington looked around the room for a moment before clapping his hands and running towards a clump of fake trees, which were there to gussy the place up for conferences and the like. He picked up the eight-foot-tall fake ficuses two at a time and hauled them on stage, until the band was more-or-less completely obscured by plastic trees. Les Savy Fav played a blistering, chaotic show with Harrington darting in and out of his impromptu forest, crouching and lunging from his wooded den like some sort of wild beast.
Les Savy Fav formed at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, (incubator for art rockers from the Talking Heads on down to Lightning Bolt), where bassist Syd Butler pieced together a band around a shared love of Fugazi. They took their name from a 19th century movement in French painting characterized by a rejection of form: critics of the day lambasted the artists, labeling them “Les Fauve (The Wild Beasts).” A rejection of typical forms is still a part of their work: although their songs have verses and choruses, and rarely lasting more than four minutes, they’re composed of juxtaposed fragments of lyrics and melody.
The band’s instrumental backing, provided by Butler and guitar wiz Seth Jabour, is like a necklace composed of so many gems strung out on a wire. Dense, jazzy chords, single note riffs, and distorted skronk flow into one another in a dense stream of music. It is not elegant. Jabour cites the Police’s Andy Summers as a major influence, and you can hear it in the way he plays in the gap between chords and melody. But whereas Summers always came to the guitar with a jazzman’s deft touch, Jabour makes it feel like he’s got it barely under control, like there should be other notes playing that he can’t quite fit in. (Indeed that’s often the case: he claims he developed his unique guitar style by trying to play his parts, and those of departed band mate Gibb Slife, at the same time.) His playing fits well with the band’s aesthetic: artful, but teetering on the brink of disaster.
Les Savy Fav songs often build momentum as drummer Harrison Haynes changes up the beat several times, Harrington’s vocals crescendoing into scream-along codas that leer at the listener. In his best moments Harrington can make the whole singer/audience relationship delightfully uncomfortable, as in the pulsating dance-punk of “Disco Drive,” from their most recent album, Go Forth. Harrington, always a prophetic poet, barks: “Don’t trust the poets: they wanna get paid. They’re plying their trade to the art of getting laid. Don’t trust the prophets: their visions are fudged. They’re buying our houses and selling us floods.”
Though I must say I’m quite in love with everything about the band, it’s Harrington’s paranoid, dystopian, yet incredibly playful lyrics that really stand out. Over the course of the band’s four albums, they paint a garish postmodernist picture of society. Though his is an overtly literary approach, his lyrics can sound nonsensical at times. It reflects what they see as the breakdown of language, and a society that’s predicated on it. “People will often ask me, ‘what’s your band’s politics? What’s your politics on this? What’s your politics on that?,” Harrington says by phone. “And I tell them that one of the main things for me, and for the rest of the band, is that the whole place has already burnt down. That everything went wrong in Rome. I don’t know who was trying to put a Band-Aid on a sinking ship. The idea of trying to fix things and like, what’s really to blame is the written language. That’s where everything started going bad.”
The band indulged its linguistic penchant in the naming of its 2000 EP, Rome [written upside down]. (Yeah, the name is the word written upside down.) The title is a reference to a hex mentioned in the book “I Claudius,” about the intreagues and eventual fall of the Roman empire. “To write the name of something upside down is a total hex, and to write the name of Rome upside down is like, obviously everyone was a Roman, and Rome was their whole lives. So it’s like, ‘this is your entire world upside down.’ A complete hex on everything: ‘your world is gone.’”
It’s a grim prognosis, but Les Savy Fav make the apocalypse sound like a party. Case in point: the spastic blitz of “Pills,” from Go Forth. It leads off with the memorable lines, “Once when walking in the woods, I came upon a burning bush. ‘What wants you, vision,’ says I? And it spoke, and I quote, ‘Apocalypse can go down easy. You gotta know it’s an acquired taste. Your sacrifice can’t please me: I’m dead set to destroy this place.’”
While the band is devastating live, one of their real feats has been their clever approach to adapting their songs for record. "I think one of things we've always struggled with is trying to figure out how you get the energy of being live, 'cause obviously a tape recording of a live show doesn't convey that at all-at least, not to us. Maybe it does one time when you listen to it, but then after you listen to it once it's gone. Obviously, live, we're really interested in spontaneity and improvising. And one of our big things is, how can you record in a way that, when you've got this thing that's never gonna change, but you can still feel like it changes?"
Their solution has been melding their raw, live-in-the-studio performances with all manner of sonic manipulations and complex vocal overdubs. Tracks like "Disco Drive" throb and grind with distorted energy, and they stand up to repeated listens.
But you really owe it to yourself to check out Les Savy Fav in the flesh. Part performance art, part rock show, all spectacle, the band has a way of making the highbrow delightfully lowbrow, and vice versa. Drinking becomes anarchy becomes a commentary on the state of society. Or something. Anyway you look at it, it's a hoot.
Les Savy Fav plays at the glorious Turf Club in St. Paul on Wed., April 9, with Frenchkiss labelmates S Prcss (I think that’s pronounced “S-Process”) and locals So Fox. 9 p.m. $8. 21+. 1601 University Ave, St. Paul. 651-647-0486.
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